- Provider for Medicare or Medicaid;
- Be a meaningful EHR user
- Physicians must qualify
- Proves to have implemented a qualified EHR software and be interoperable
Physicians with a qualified EHR, qualified EMR in place before 2011 or 2012 will be eligible for the maximum Medicare incentive payments allowed by the stimulus package. Doctors who have not adopted an EHR before 2015 and who fail to obtain a hardship exemption will see a 1% cut to Medicare pay, a reduction that phases up to 3% for 2017 and remains each year after that.
In 2011, however, the reward for e-prescribing will begin to decrease, a fee for not using e-prescribing will begin in 2012. The e-prescribing incentive payment will be 1 percent in 2011 and 2012, and 0.5 percent in 2013. The fee for not using e-prescribing will be a reduction in Medicare reimbursement by 1 percent in 2012, 1.5 percent in 2013, and 2 percent in 2014.
Depreciation and Expenses 2009
Section 179 limits. The maximum expense deduction you can elect for qualified property you placed in service in tax years that begin in 2009 remains at $250,000 ($285,000 for qualified enterprise zone property and qualified renewal community property). This limit is reduced by the amount by which the cost of property placed in service in the tax year exceeds $800,000
Under the 2008 Economic Stimulus Act (ESA), you can take further advantage of the Section 179 expense allowance to write off the entire cost of your new and used Healthcare equipment purchases in 2008.
Specifically, the expense allowance has been temporarily increased from $128,000 to $250,000 for taxpayers with total capital investments of $800,000 or less. Equipment acquired with a capital lease ($1 purchase option) and placed into service by December 31, 2008 is eligible for the increased allowance.
| EMR Options |
EMR VS EHR
Some professionals have defined the terminology like this;
EMR: "The electronic record of health-related information on an individual that is created, gathered, managed, and consulted by licensed clinicians and staff from a single organization who are involved in the individual’s health and care"
EHR: "The aggregate electronic record of health-related information on an individual that is created and gathered cumulatively across more than one health care organization and is managed and consulted by licensed clinicians and staff involved in the individual’s health and care"
The above definition is entirely correct. Defining the term EMR or EHR is easy in order to increase the value of the product itself. But any vendor that proposes EMR & EHR has the same vision of the EHR dream, which is still in its infancy to achieve the full and real EHR goal.
Most physicians and IT people from hospitals, and big practices were used to the term EMR, which stands for Electronic Medical Records. In order to go beyond the adopted EMR term, many of these same professionals went further and wanted to create a new terminology that would demonstrate more functionality beyond the EMR. By then, the EMR had enough functionality needed for the practice and for the practice only, hence the EHR terminology was created. The EHR or Electronic Health Records was supposed to be richer in functionality, a lot more than what EMR was. EHR was supposed to interconnect providers, service providers, connections to imaging systems from other providers, hospitals and many more connections with other EHR's. The EMR itself was heading in the right direction, and nowadays there are better EMR's interconnected than EHR's companies that started with the EHR vision.
The market itself has also confused the terminology: vendors, government, hospitals, advertisement companies, consultants, and physicians have propagated fancy words to describe the same EMR functionality, and it was a matter of time to have a more robust EMR. The EHR is just the fancy word for EMR, and EMR is just the fundamental origin of the Electronic Health Records.
With the terminology EHR, it was supposed to be a collection of information from many providers by pulling out information from many different data sources or places, where the information can be seen together in one single view and be able to have better assessments for patients.
The reality is that the technology does not exist as of the time of writing this article, some may say that they have the technology in their practice because they are a multi-specialty practice and are able to see other physician notes on the same screen; the EHR fundamental idea is not based on internal shared communications among physicians, but external. Most EMR development companies now have to use both terms in their marketing because they do not want to loose the opportunity to be seen by physicians searching for the term EMR or EHR. The fact is that there is not such EMR vs EHR, comparison. Companies are evolving and presenting more options on their products, eventually satisfying the dream of having providers connecting together to provide the best assessment possible for patients.
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